Large (.vapi) files are extremely slow to load when Vala Symbol pane is active and may cause freeze

[jeremypw]

What Happened?

Activate the symbol pane and then tried to open a .vapi file with about 10,000 lines. Code froze pretty much indefinitely. With smaller .vapi files, 5000 lines tool 2 - 3 seconds to parse but 1 - 2000 lines there was minimal delay.

Steps to Reproduce

• Activate the right-hand pane (Vala symbols)
• Open a large .vapi file (e.g. clutter-1.0.vapi)
• Observe interface frozen indefinitely (freeze may occur after a few seconds depending on resources available and whether editing is attempted before symbols loaded)

Expected Behavior

The Vala Symbol pane should cope gracefully with files with many, deeply nested symbols when resources become short.

OS Version

8.x (Circe)

Session Type

Secure Session (Wayland)

Software Version

Latest release (I have run all updates)

Log Output

Hardware Info

Running in a VM with comparatively limited resources (8 cores, 8GB memory). Also occurs to a lesser extent in OS7.1 running natively with 16 cores and 16GBmemory,

[jeremypw]

It is debatable whether it is necessary to parse .vapi files. Actual .vala files tend to be smaller and I have not noticed an issue with them.